Friday, September 27, 2024

The Commonalities Between the Rise of the Nazis and the Tactics of the American Left

 

ARTICLE:
The Commonalities Between the Rise of the Nazis and the Tactics of the American Left Cannot be Ignored  
by Steve McCann, 

This March 2021 article in the AMERICAN THINKER was so well-written and to-the-point I had to share some direct quotes. Note that I added some BOLD or italics for emphasis.   
Here is the direct LINK: americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/the_commonalities_between_the_rise_of_the_nazis_and_the_tactics_of_the_american_left_cannot_be_ignored.html  

The article focuses on 6 areas of similarity:
  • 1st racial division
  • 2nd censorship, cancel culture
  • 3rd propaganda & “fake news”
  • 4th corporate and tech titan financial support for Dem Party
  • 5th violent street riots – compared militant Antifa and BLM with Sturmabteilung (SA) 
    For more details on the SA, also known as Brown Shirts, visit USHMM 
    https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-sa#violence-and-purge-2 
  • 6th using a manufactured crisis to advance its cause

Fifth -
“the Nazi Party routinely relied on street riots, property damage and gratuitous violence utilizing their militant cadre, the Sturmabteilung (SA), to project power through intimidation while blaming the communists for the violence.  Every time a riot was met with little or no response from the established authorities, the more emboldened they became.  [ NOTE: this could also be applied to the pro-Hamas, ant-Israel violence on college campuses ]
 
The American left revealed in the summer of 2020 that they too have the wherewithal and inclination to provoke street riots, property damage and gratuitous violence utilizing their militant cadre, Antifa and Black Lives Matter, to project power through intimidation while blaming white supremacy and police brutality for the violence.  ”

Sixth - creating a crisis event & using it to further their ambitions

“in January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany.  Within four weeks a mysterious fire broke out in the Reichstag (Congress) Building which they blamed on communist agitators and that this was the opening salvo in a violent coup.  Using this pretext, the Nazis were able to force through the Reichstag The Enabling Act of 1933 in March of the same year.   This law embedded the Nazis as the sole dominant political party and ensured that only the Nazis could win future elections, if any were held.  They were the first modern proponents of never letting a crisis, real or manufactured, to go to waste. 
 
The left and the Democrat party seized upon the disturbances at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 to proclaim that it was an “armed insurrection” and the opening salvo in a violent coup attempt by white supremacists.  …..  
Further following in the footsteps of the Nazi Party, the Democrats almost immediately pushed to pass H.R. 1 (euphemistically entitled The For The People Act) which would overturn virtually all existing voter laws, embed the Democrats as the sole dominant political party and ensure that only the Democrats could win future elections.  
 
This list of parallels between the Nazi Party and the American left cannot be ignored.  ….
The manner in which a small fringe far-left socialist party was able to rise to power and how the left in America is emulating it should frighten all Americans.”

Tuesday, December 26, 2023

Post Oct 7th Massacre and Kidnapping of Israelis by Hamas Terrorists

Since the Oct7th massacre in Israel, I find it disheartening to see people show more concern for children of Gaza than Jewish children held hostage by Hamas. The Israeli hostages are being abused, starved, burned, raped by Hamas terrorists.  They are neglected by the media and by the International Red Cross.  Checkout this article "timesofisrael.com/relative-of-freed-captives-say-hamas-branded-child-hostages-in-case-they-escaped. The Israeli Biba babies are still missing – a 9 month old and 2 yr old, whereabouts unknown. Posters of hostages ripped down or defaced by hateful Hamas supporters in our cities and on our college campuses.

It's so important to get your news from multiple perspectives and to recognize skewed and anti-Israel broadcasting, especially what remains unspoken.   When I turned on Channel 2 News, a few days after retaliatory strikes had begun against Hamas by the IDF, I shuttered when I heard the female broadcaster state that there were "heavy casualties on both sides".  There is no excuse for equating the unprovoked brutal slaughter of innocent Israelis, including women and children,  with the causalities of war in Gaza, which includes terrorists and are mostly overstated by Hamas.   




Conditions Leading Up to & Following Oct 7th - under Biden

Since Biden took office, the world has been in disarray:  Beginning with the disastrous debacle in Afghanistan.  The weapons we left behind, were used by Hamas in their recent Oct 7th massacre of Israeli civilians.  Biden, Blinken, & Sullivan resumed funding the Iranian Regime and removed all sanctions against them, enacted during Trump's administration.   After Oct7th, Instead of putting the focus on getting Hamas to surrender and release all the hostages, Biden is trying to control Israel – telling Bibi Netanyahu to cease fighting in Southern Gaza, and to allow the Palestinian Authority control.     Biden has done nothing to sanction COLLEGEs that promote pro-HAMAS rallies. Biden is not a true friend of the Jewish people or the Jewish State. 

Biden continues  endangering our own US citizens by keeping our Southern border wide open, welcoming Hamas terrorists into this country.  Trump had our border secured and the wall was almost completely built.   Biden is focused on appeasing the far-left Jew-haters in his Democratic Party jinsa.org/biden-and-co-funding-palestinian-terror/    


FIGHTING the FALSE NARRATIVES against the JEWISH STATE

Regarding the pro-Palesine rallies, theblaze.com/news/ron-desantis-israel-hamas-students-terrorism-visas, Ron DeSantis described them, "If you look at how they behave, not all of them are Hamas, but they are all anti-Semitic."   Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) called on the Biden administration to rescind visas of foreign nationals who support Hamas.  Biden has yet to respond.

In this video, "Ben Shapiro talks about Israel vs Hamas and why he would never support Biden over Trump",  highlights the ignorance of a pro-Palestinian Oxford Union College student. 

In this 11/26/23 CNN Interview ,  Naftali Bennett, former Israeli Prime Minister, responds to the question of a 2-state solution, "We gave them their own state, in 2005, when we pulled out of GAZA, with its beautiful beaches…. They turned it into HAMASTAN ….. a terror state. Who wants to live next to a Nazi state?"


Trump Protected Jews on College Campuses and in Israel 

Check out Mark Levin’s monologue in this 12/03/23 episode foxnews.com/video/6342310894112 .   He details how the media portrays Trump as an evil dictator.  In reality, Trump is a true friend of Israel and the Jewish people. According to Levin “No other President has done as much for the Jewish people.”

Mark Levin listed Trump’s accomplishments:

  • cut off ALL funding to the Palestinians – closed the PLO office  
  • pulled US out of the Anti-Semitic UNHRC and cut off their funding
  • appointed Niki Haley to defend Israel in her role as Ambassador to the UN 
  • brought about the Abraham Accords, without giving up territory, creating ground breaking peace in the MidEast
  • issued an Executive order to protect Jewish College students, using the civil rights act. 
  • ended the Iranian nuclear deal.  imposed crushing sanctions against Iran.  Iran’s economy was in a deep recession…. The Iranian people were protesting.
  • signed the Taylor Force Act to prevent "pay for slay" by the Palestinian Authority.  

I recommend these educational watchdog sites which use facts to fight the false hateful narratives against Israel and to fight pro-Hamas propaganda.













Monday, September 12, 2022

Marxist Censorship, Cancel Culture, & the power of the Media

In Chapter 6 of his book "American Marxism", Mark Levin describes the Marxist tactics used to subvert our Democracy, by our mainstream media and "Big Tech", social media giants (FB, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon...). According to The Center for Responsive Politics, executives at Big Tech firms have shown their bias towards Democrats through their donations of millions to 2020 Democratic candidate campaigns.  They have also conspired against rival Conservatives, using smear campaigns and deplatforming, including former President Trump and Conservative Parler.

Big Tech uses sophisticated algorithms to censor what they decide is hate speech.   Much of their Artificial Intelligence technology was developed originally by the Chinese Communist Party to stifle political dissent.   Just like in a Communist regime, any debate that would challenge our government's Marxist-based ideology can not be tolerated. Truth is their enemy.  

Marxists refer to their movements and ideologies using euphemistic terms, such as "Progressives", "Democratic Socialists", "Antifa", "Black Lives Matter" (BLM), "the Squad", "Critical Race Theory" (CRT).  Their ultimate goal is a one-party left-wing autocracy.  

Our Marxist media thrives on exploiting a crises. I watched the news repeat the image of George Floyd's last moments, everyday.  Everyday the media reinforced the narrative of systemic racism in the police force, by exploiting this one incident, fanning the flames of hatred against the police in order to divide us, inciting riots during summer 2020.   However, when a Black cop shot a White protester, Ashley Babitt, on 1/6/21, the media avoided any mention of it.... that Black cop was later celebrated as a hero.    

Levin is appalled by the disparity of our justice system.   The violent BLM/ Antifa rioters from last summer were not apprehended. VP Harris funded bail for those who were. Our radical left government supports and protects these violent Antifa rioters.   Antifa.com website is a portal to our own whitehouse.gov.  

Mark Levin gave kudos to Governor DeSantis for filling in where our government is negligent. For example, the open border crisis has resulting in millions of unvetted illegal immigrants being bused throughout the US, including Florida.   DeSantis has redirected those busses to DC. When our government ignores violent Antifa, DeSantis responded by issuing a law making violence during a protest a felony, thereby increasing penalties in the State of Florida. 

The press has incredible power to move people. If only the media used their power for good.  If they had repeated images of Hitler's brutality during the Holocaust, maybe then American citizens would have pressured our government to increase immigration quota for Jewish refugees?  The NY Times hid any mention of the horrors of the Holocaust deep in the middle of the paper. It should have been persistent, front page, prime time coverage.   

Monday, May 23, 2022

My Top 10 Lists of LINKS - Do your own digging for the facts - here are helpful sites!

Biden's chaos and crises - baby formula crisis, border crisis, gas price surges, exponential inflation, his declining cognitive mental state, & more.  We need to be informed. Don't believe me; Check for yourself. 

If you only listen to mainstream media, you will only hear the propaganda of the Democratic party. They censor anything negative to their party line, while often slandering Israel and Trump supporters. You have to be willing to dig for the truth by seeking alternative news sources.

Here are some reputable news sites: 

  1. prageru.com - playlists discuss relevant issues
  2. dailywire.com - Read, Listen, or Watch - Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, .... 
  3. comicallyincorrect.com/category/af-branco-political-cartoons/  - Branco says it all with powerful cartoon images
  4. legalinsurrection.com  - Branco cartoons
  5. skynews.com.au/world-news/united-states  - Australia is watching us - we should listen
  6. NewsMax 
  7. OAN - One America News Network
  8. RSBN - rsbnetwork.com
  9. libertynation.com/top-conservative-news-sites - for other sites
  10. BlazeTV - youtu.be/7xGSRyDLHdw - Jim Jordan speaks out  1/12/2021 
Here are some reputable sites that are fighting for the Jewish State of Israel:
  1. factsandlogic.org - FLAME - Facts and Logic About the Middle East - combats anti-Israel propaganda with proven facts.
  2. camera.org - Committee for Accuracy in MidEast Reporting
  3. AZM.org - American Zionist Movement - lots of great programming
  4. Simon Wiesenthal Center
  5. https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/karl-marx  
  6. Seeking the Truth about Israel 
  7. The Case for Israel: Land Ownership in Palestine 1880-1948 by Moshe Aumann  (PDF posted on wordfromjerusalem.com )
  8. World Affairs Journal: Enough Said-The False Scholarship of Edward Said
  9. Hamas on Campus
  10. DiscoverTheNetworks.org

Don't believe the 2020 Election was hacked? 
Here are the hidden testimonies on voter fraud and voter irregularities. The Supreme Court refused to hear them and mainstream media censored them, That doesn't make them non-existent or false. Decide for yourself:

  1. ** youtu.be/XeRz61N4IFA?t=103  - Greg Kelly on Newsmax TV - the Media's double standard 12/1/2020   (especially relevant today!)
  2. video.foxnews.com/v/6213477546001?playlist_id=930909813001#sp=show-clips   HANNITY interviews USPS Truck driver Jesse.  Jessie drove a Truck full of ballots from Bethpage LI  to Pennsylvania.
  3. youtu.be/3wObE1JCQMg?t=444   OAN Pittsburgh video surveillance
  4. youtu.be/3wObE1JCQMg?t=5601  Susan Boyle - POLL mgr- Fulton County GA Hearings.... Lack of training, flawed chain of custody - OAN 12/4/2020 
  5. https://youtu.be/3wObE1JCQMg?t=9070  Mark Damik - state wide POLL watcher 
  6. ** youtu.be/3wObE1JCQMg?t=10280     DANA VanBuren Smith Poll Worker / Watcher emotional handling of paper ballots, no ballot chain of custody 
  7. ** youtu.be/5vjy3rCnmgE  IT Dominion woman - blond  with rowdy black rep!
  8. ** youtu.be/G2f3aw9rk30  Dominion consultant   -  Melissa Carone - Rudy Giuliani’s Star Voter Fraud Witness at Michigan Hearing | NowThis
  9. ** youtube.com/watch?v=L-VOSEU3ybs - the NUMBERS - 'A Trump loss is improbable to the point of impossible’—look at the math—Trump Advisor Steve Cortes


Monday, June 28, 2021

American Democracy at risk ....MSM, BLM, CRT, ...


Since Biden took office, I feel like we are living in a Communist dictatorship. 
Instead of unity, Biden labeled Trump fans deplorables, white supremacists and targeted them for harsh punishment. Trump fans who attended the 1/6 protest at the Capital, many who were ushered in by capital police, were apprehended for trespassing and locked up in jail cells with bail revoked.

According to Tucker Carlson, westernjournal.com/tucker-drops-fbi-bombshell-jan-6-organizers-almost-certainly-working-fbi   FBI operatives were instigators of 1/6.  We don’t know who shot Ashli Babbitt, the unarmed woman who was killed during the incursion. We still haven’t seen what Carlson said was “more than 10,000 hours of surveillance tape from the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6."     Why aren’t alleged organizers and instigators being charged when people who seem to have been little more than tourists are facing years in prison?

According to Mark Levin of Life, Liberty and Levin, our government is rounding up these political opponents. Just the word "round-ups" strikes terror in my heart. Along with rampant propaganda and censorship, this is what makes up a Totalitarian government. These round-up operations are secretive. This article describes how FBI agents targeted a couple in Alaska, just one example of these round-ups.

During the May 2020 insurrection in Minnesota, BLM Antifa thugs burned a police station to the ground. Those thugs don’t need to worry, Kamala has funded their bail. Antifa and BLM violence is sanctioned by our administration. It is part of their plan to instill chaos in our cities, while defunding the police. Like Greg Kelley says, BLM and MSM only care when a black life is taken by a white cop…. in order to perpetuate their systemic racism and anti-police agenda.

To make sense of what is happening in our country, I reached out to Professor Kyong (Keith) Chu, Chair of the History Department at Bergen Community College. Here is his response… “It's mind boggling to me that this is happening in our nation. The partisanship and hatred is really ruining our democracy. It seems to me that its always been there as a kind of pilot light just waiting for the right moment to ignite into something bigger …I just hope it doesn't take a catastrophic event for everyone to see the truth”

Critical Race Theory (CRT)


CRT is dangerous - it is based on Marxist ideology designed to divide us, and create a race war. If you are dark-skinned you are oppressed. If you are light-skinned you are labelled an oppressor. If my parents were alive today, they would be labelled oppressors, despite the fact that they were Holocaust survivors. What happened to the teachings of Martin Luther King? We should be judged based on our character, not our skin color. One of my favorite MLK quotes applies here, “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” Historical facts should be taught; slavery, the Holocaust, etc. Many students do not even know there was a Holocaust! Instead of teaching CRT’s hateful rhetoric, we should be teaching the Holocaust, not just 2 hours or a single day, but a full curriculum. 
I am heartened by the courageous, ferocious parents who stand up for their children against this hateful rhetoric…in front of their school boards.
Recently, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis directed his State Board of Education to stop CRT and the 1619 Project from becoming a part of their school’s curriculum. ”We do not want curriculum that is judging students based on their race and we do not want false history,” DeSantis wants to stop the whitewashing of the horrors committed by communist thugs like Mao Zedong & Che Guevara.  In addition, the bill mandates diversity of thought on college campuses, to prevent leftist indoctrination and intolerance of dissenting viewpoints.  Read article in Dailywire news.

FAKE NEWS - Mainstream Media (MSM) 

Our country has become so polarized. I can’t even discuss the issues with my colleagues on the left as they are ignorant of the facts. They only listen to and believe what the mainstream media is feeding them. MSM censors anything that does not fit their Democratic Socialist narrative of systemic racism. You have to seek out alternative news sites like OAN, NewsMaxx, Fox News, Daily Wire, Prager U, legalinsurrection.com etc. to get the full story and to hear the truth about Israel, election laws, CRT etc. MSM Stations like CBS, NBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC promote the far left, anti-Israel, anti-American viewpoint. They are the propaganda arm of the Democratic Socialist movement. 

If we don't speak up we are complicit. When I post on Facebook, however, I get attacked. 
Here is a typical example of stupidity after I exposed the truth about CRT on FB:

  • NM (leftist):  Beverly you’re wrong that crt is either bad or Marxist. And it’s surely based on facts. Your argument is not. That’s some bs site, not real news. The facts are we have a history of systemic racism in our country, and we should teach that. The rest is you having a tantrum, I guess cuz you don’t want White children to learn racism exists
  • ME: I am the daughter of Holocaust survivors, so I know what is happening here. I know what happened in the Gulags. It does not matter the site posted, the woman's speech went viral and you should listen to it. Some people can't tolerate a different viewpoint and choose to attack me instead. I think we should be teaching about how propaganda and censorship led to the Holocaust and now the Uighur genocide.
  • NM: we do teach that. We should also be teaching systemic racism exists and that it leads to the killing of unarmed black people, hence the need for the BLM movement. Teaching about racism in schools is neither propaganda nor censorship. Now you’re like just making up words.
  • ME: you should do some research on BLM. You will find that it an Anti-Semitic Marxist organization, that is embezzling funds.
  • NM: You gotta stop w this racism, Beverly.

Sunday, January 24, 2021

Media Campaign against Trump & Censorship




For the past four years  Trump was subjected to an incessant smear campaign from the leftist mainstream media (MSM). He was falsely accused of Russia collusion and relentlessly bullied. He was portrayed as a monster white-supremacist, because he put America first; never any acknowledgement of his monumental successes. Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” developed a CoVid vaccine in 10 months, despite being told it was impossible. As mentioned in my prior post, his administration negotiated the historic Abraham Accords, achieving peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. December, 2019, he passed the new Anti-Semitism Definition  to protect Jewish college students. (Details saved  trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-combating-anti-semitism ).  He hired Nikki Haley, the first Ambassador to the UN, to courageously stand up for Israel, against the anti-Israel bias in the UN. Haley also stood up against their pro-Hamas resolutions. She referred to her inaugural role as “the new sheriff in town”.  According to Mike Kelley of NewsMax –“ ISIS was born under Obama and obliterated by Trump… Trump brought ISIS down.”  No other president achieved what Trump and his administration did in just four years.  

Just like Obama, we only hear accolades for Biden regardless of his actions, from MSM.  Hannity described the media’s treatment of  Biden as their “candidate protection program”.  MSM is silent about the Biden family dealings with Communist China.   MSM Journalists no longer do any research. They only attack or silence their adversaries. They agitate and bully Trump and Republicans. In this video Rep. Ron DeSantis responds to an aggressive CNN reporter.

ANTIFA RIOTS
Back in June, 2020, after violent BLM/Antifa mobs burned down a Minneapolis Police Station, Kamala Harris responded with , “This is a movement…They are not going to stop and they should NOT”.  Antifa bombed and burned cities. Over 7 months of BLM/Antifa riots in Democratic cities, resulted in 45 innocent citizens killed, 700 police officers injured, small businesses looted and destroyed, 150 federal buildings damaged, defaced, burned.  Instead of outrage, Democrats empowered these thugs. Kamala funded their bail.  www.antifa.com is a redirect to Biden’s whitehouse.gov .

According to DailyTorch 1/21/2021 article “Exposing Democrat Hypocrisy over Political Violence”,  “Democrats who encouraged and funded the Antifa, BLM rioters for most of the past year, wasted no time exploiting the Capitol attack for political gain." In Biden’s inaugural address he characterized 75 million Trump fans as domestic terrorists, Neo-Nazis, & fascists.  Biden incited his fellow leftists to track down Trump supporters. This is not unity; this is the KGB.  

The CAPITAL 1/06/2021
They blamed Trump for inciting the handful of thugs who stormed the capital.  In his speech Trump called for “peaceful” protests. The media censored that video and Twitter & Facebook deleted his accounts, disconnecting him from his people: We the People.  Renowned lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, refers to this as McCarthyism. According to Mark Levin of “Life, Liberty, & Levin”, the FBI knew of the attack, days prior and did nothing. 

John Earle Sullivan, a radical self-described “revolutionary” who founded a group called “Insurgence USA,” was arrested and charged with planning and inciting a riot amid the heavy pro-Trump crowd at the U.S. Capitol.   He was one of many radical leftist and Antifa infiltrators who blended into the crowd. Sullivan was seen on video shouting to a crowd, over a microphone, “we about to burn this shit down,” “we got to rip Trump out of office".  Details can be found in this document.

Historical Parallels
The censorship and targeting of 75 million Trump fans, along with the shutdown of conservative voices on Facebook, Twitter and Parler, is a great big red flag.   Remember the historical parallels.  From 1927 – 1933 Germany went from Democracy to a 1-party Nazi system, censoring all dissenting political views.  Nazi Propaganda was everywhere. 

Isn’t that what is happening here, now?  Leftist propaganda as delivered by MSM, newspapers, social-ist media…Our MSM is the propaganda arm of the Democratic party.  According to Mike Pompeo “Censorship, wokeness, political correctness, it all points in one direction – authoritarianism, cloaked as moral righteousness."  Nikki Haley stated, “From college classrooms to corporate boardrooms, … liberal elites want to silence anyone who does not toe the far left line."  Freedom of speech has been compromised, replaced by fake news and censorship.

For historical perspective, these quotes come from USHMM article on Nazi-propaganda-and-censorship:
“When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the German constitution guaranteed freedom of speech and freedom of the press…The Nazis controlled all  forms of communication through censorship and propaganda… By the middle of 1933, the Nazi Party was the only political party, and nearly all organized opposition to the regime had been eliminated. Democracy was dead in Germany.”


Sunday, October 4, 2020

Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the MEDIA

Our television media and our social media have failed to protect the values of truth in journalism. I recently watched the Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma”. Facebook (FB) was portrayed as a powerful puppeteer, feeding into whatever view the user is leaning towards. If a FB user was leaning left, soon FB was feeding them radical leftist propaganda and conspiracy theories: Whatever strategies would hold the user as a captive audience, and gain the most “likes”. Truth has become irrelevant. We are living in George Orwell’s 1984. Your FB feed is bred by FB, to confirm your view of reality, not to challenge it.
 

FB, Google, YouTube and other social media platforms are silencing conservative voices and allowing hate speech and fake news to proliferate. Prager University videos have been banned for presenting a conservative perspective. Anti-Zionist and anti-Israel propaganda have become mainstream, accepted, normalized. In a prior post from my blog, in May 2017, I wrote about the destructive forces of propaganda against Israel, perpetrated by the Palestinians and leftist media, bootupnow.blogspot.com/2017/05/anti-israel-propaganda-prevents-peace.html 

President Trump recently negotiated the Abraham accord, the first viable peace agreement between Israel and its Arab neighbors, in 30 years. Finally, a president who sees the Palestinian threat for what it is, slanderous to Israel’s reputation world-wide, run by the terrorist organization, Hamas. Pallywood, the Palestinian theatrical media, produces fake episodes portraying Israeli military (IDF) as violent aggressors. The media promotes this biased view as truth. Prior administrations have tried to appease the Palestinians, asking Israel to make concessions and give up their land in exchange for peace. These offers of land for peace were always refused by the Palestinians.  According to a recent Ben Shapiro Daily Wire article-"Relations between Jordan and Israel, between the UAE and Israel, between Sudan and Israel, between Egypt and Israel — none now hide behind the fig leaf of Palestinian demands to avoid peace."

Trump stands by Israel and the Jewish people.  When pro-Israel students are harassed on campus, there is no outrage. The media is silent. In Dec, 2019, President Trump's executive order declared anti-Zionism a form of anti-Semitism, and added Antisemitism to the list of discriminations prohibited by Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. 

People ask me why I care so much about Israel. When Israel is slandered, I take it personally. Israel is the Jewish State, the Jewish homeland. If you criticize Israel’s policies and do NOT criticize Syria’s, Iran’s, or other fascists regimes in the MidEast, then your criticism is anti-Semitism. 

I deal with colleagues, professors at the community college I work at, who admit that they hate Zionists. When a close colleague told me this, I was very hurt. A Zionist is someone who loves Israel. Since when did Zionism become a dirty word? I blame the media for portraying Israel negatively by repeating these inciteful words: occupier, colonial, in reference to Israel. Israel is not an occupier, since Israel is, and always was, the historic Jewish homeland. The Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel. The British Mandate of Palestine returned the land of Israel to the Jews, in a legal process. Any Arab Bedouins living on the land at that time, in 1948, were paid fairly for their property by the Zionists. 

My colleagues believe what the media and other academics have fed them. It’s not only what the media covers, it’s what the media refuses to cover. How many people know about the more than 2500 acres of farmland and 2700 acres of forest burned by fire bombs and incendiary balloons launched by the Palestinians from Gaza. What about the terror tunnels and murder of innocent Israeli civilians by Hamas? As soon as Israel is accused of some alleged crime, it is all over the news. What about when Israel comes to our rescue, to help us fight fires in California? How often do you see media coverage of Israel in a positive light? 

The most righteous thing someone can do, is to speak up for someone else. The gentiles who risked their lives to defend my parents from the Nazis, there is nothing higher, more revered to me. Trump defending Israel and Zionist students on college campuses, deserves the same respect and admiration. Trump threatened to withhold federal funds from colleges promoting Anit-Israel hate propaganda. No other president has ever addressed it or tried to stop it. Hate coming from the right and neo-NAZIs, is readily disavowed. But not from the left. Anti-Semitism & Anti-Zionisn in the Democaratic party has proliferated and does not seem to abate. The Democratic Party remains  politically correct, refusing to disavow Anti-Semitism in their own party. 

Wednesday, January 1, 2020

Transcribing my Dad's Story from pencil...

Happy New Year 2020! On this blog I have often posted excerpts from my dad's story "In His Own Words." 

Sometime in the late 1990's, my dad completed writing his memoir, more than 150 pages handwritten in pencil.   When he first handed me his manuscript, he watched as I inspected it.  One of the entries in his Table of Contents was "experience".  I turned to the page and began reading. I was not expecting that "experience" referred to his first sexual experience, his visit to a brothel! 

I knew I needed to preserve his story, electronically on my computer. So I began the process of transcribing and entering his words into Word Perfect.   I did some wordsmithing and editing to tweak his English.  In one chapter he describes the increasingly threatening conditions in Paris 1942 as "titanium".  It took me a while to realize he was referring to the state of chaos, or "pandemonium."

To this day I refer back to details in his story to help me track our family tree.  My dad diligently  detailed names of cousins, their occupations, locations in Poland, street addresses in Paris.  The street addresses were a key clue in connecting a name in a database as a cousin.

My dad wrote that cousins Albert and Maurice Binstock moved into his parents' apartment on Rue Fessart.  For many years I tried to track down these two cousins in documents online. During my 2011 visit to the USHMM research floor I copied all ITS records for Binstock of Bedzin or Paris.  Finally I discovered a Mordka Binstock with the same address listed for Rue Fessart & immediately I knew I had found my "Maurice."  It wasn't till 2014 that I connected with his living descendant, Remy, through Twitter.

I could write an entire miniseries just from the stories that were passed down. The survivor witnesses, each with their own unique story of survival: my mom, my aunts, my uncle, my cousins.

My next step is to get my dad's story published in a book, to share with the world.   My dad would want his name as the writer. I can put my name as editor. Not sure how to begin the process.